Who did Bob Dylan write ‘Visions of Johanna’ about?
It’s been over half a century now, and ‘Visions of Johanna’ still continues to astound. Perhaps it always will.
The startling song is one of several lyrical masterpieces on Bob Dylan’s 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde. It extends out across five sublime verses that capture their author’s stream of consciousness perhaps more lucidly than anything else he ever wrote, stopping to remind us after each that his only real fixation is the woman who’s “not here”.
Former poet laureate Andrew Motion is convinced that Dylan’s lyrics for the song are the greatest ever written, naming them as the only instance of genuine poetry in the history of popular music. Delving deeper into these lyrics, it’s easy to see why they elicit such grand statements from revered wordsmiths.
Their writer brilliantly frames his narrative within the dead of a New York night before proceeding to immerse us in the “tricks” this night is playing on his senses. We’re all left wondering what’s real and imagined as Dylan performs an exquisite balancing act between the actual and the surreal, the physical and the emotional.
We hear heat pipes “cough”, and a flashlight click as a watchman asks “if it’s him or them that’s insane”. We see a “primitive wallflower” and “jelly-faced women” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the “empty cage” of Dylan’s lamplit writing room “corrode” while a “fish truck” loads its early-morning delivery outside his window. And we feel, with agonising clarity, the nearness of Dylan’s “delicate” lover, Louise, which pales into insignificance next to the enduring absence of the song’s titular character.
It’s not just you, though, Louise. It’s “infinity” and “salvation”, too. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can compare to visions of the one who haunts the artist’s every thought, feeling and action, from entwinement with his current lover to inexplicable sleeplessness “past the dawn”. Ultimately, as the song draws to a daylit conclusion, these visions of Johanna are “all that remain” for the man who has them.
Is Johanna real, then?
We can interpret Dylan’s visions as hallucinations or just particularly visceral memories brought on by longing for a past love. Either way, they’re likely described as such for artistic effect, drawing on a poetic tradition that goes back thousands of years, in which various authors from Catullus to John Milton have portrayed themselves as experiencing the divine apparition of a lost lover.
From the context around Blonde on Blonde, though, we can conclude that Johanna was very much a real person. And her absence is the result of her and Dylan breaking off a relationship in the year leading up to the album’s release. We know several songs on the album contain autobiographical references to the singer’s romances around the time it was written and recorded, and he’s even confirmed the person at least one of these songs refers to.
The record’s closer ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ is about the woman Dylan had recently married at the time, Sara Lownds, which he affirms both in his lyrics for the later song ‘Sara’ and one of his autobiographies.
The title of ‘Sad-Eyed Lady’ is a thinly disguised allusion to his wife’s name, and the title of ‘Visions of Johanna’ serves the same purpose. But unfortunately for Sara Lownds, she’s not ‘Johanna’. In fact, she’s highly likely to be the song’s “Louise”, whose very presence reminds the singer of Johanna’s absence.
Instead, the name “Johanna” clearly alludes to his previous girlfriend, Joan Baez, a woman of towering stature in the folk music world who had the charisma, intellect, moral compass and leadership credentials to challenge every facet of Dylan’s being during their two years together. Baez was the bigger star when they started seeing each other, and her voice counted for far more in the American civil rights movement.
That soon changed, however, and by early 1965, Dylan began to feel he’d outgrown the girlfriend who’d brought him to the attention of the protest movement. He and Baez were on diverging artistic paths by then, and he left her behind to explore the avant-garde scene of Andy Warhol’s Factory and Allen Ginsberg’s beat poetry.
Still, as ‘Visions of Johanna’ illustrates, Dylan’s feelings for Baez were incredibly profound and difficult to shake. The two were kindred spirits in many ways, as the beautiful young standard bearers of the American protest song. And it was impossible for any other woman to compete with the effect Baez had had on Dylan during that period of his life, even after the two had parted ways.
His wife might have taken her place by his side, but Baez’s presence was still felt in other ways. Many of these are painfully articulated in one of his most extraordinary pieces of songwriting.
What did Dylan think of the song?
Blonde on Blonde was the first double album ever, and you can’t underestimate the impact of that. It made it perfectly clear that the pop song could also be high art rather than something cut for profit and radio-friendly. The album was, quite literally, an expansion of what was possible in the realm of pop songwriting.
However, Dylan later worried that he might have over-indulged with this pioneering premise. As he later reflected, when he was at his most verbose with tracks like ‘Visions of Johanna’ he worried that they were “too much and not enough.” He said, “A lot of my songs strike me that way.” Even going so far as to say, “Somebody told me that Tennyson often wanted to rewrite his poems when he saw them in print.”
But as Mick Jagger once said, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” There are endless fans who would heap that praise upon this Dylan classic.
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